A Proxy for Mobile Web Access

About FOXY

FOXY is a filtering web proxy server (FOXY = Filtering
prOXY).
Originally designed to provide device-independent access to the World
Wide Web, it can also be used for a variety of related tasks such as
HTTP filtering, extraction and reauthoring of existing web content, or
even as security device against web-based attacks (XSS..).

Documentation

This is a research prototype. Hence, we do not provide a
complete User's Guide yet.
Nevertheless, we offer a provisional (i.e. selected chapters of the
Master's thesis [1]
discussing FOXY) version for download (PDF).
Auto-generated (and therefore not really pretty formatted)
HTML versions
of this document are also available online (one
large page
/ multiple
pages).

1:
Viktor Moser. "FOXY - A Proxy for Mobile Web Access". Master's Thesis.
Technical University of Vienna, February 2006
2:
Naturally, filtered versions of the presented examples will not be
available until your browser has been configured to use FOXY
as HTTP proxy (see Quickstart).
top

Prerequisites

Install

Quickstart

A straightforward way to start FOXY is by executing the run-script located in the main-folder
of the distribution (either run.bat or run.sh).
This script starts the proxy server in a small shell which provides
general server information (listening port..) and allows changes of the configuration (i.e. filtering behavior) at runtime.

Before you can take advantage of FOXY's filtering capabilities,
your browser must be configured to use FOXY as
HTTP proxy server :
Assuming FOXY's default settings (listening port: 8080) have not been modified
and that the browser and FOXY are running on the same machine
(for a quickstart, we strongly recommend to run the proxy server locally),
following settings of the browser's HTTP proxy configuration
would be appropriate: Host: localhost, Port: 8080.

After the proxy server has been started and the web browser is configured properly,
a quick overview of FOXY's functionality may easily be obtained by
opening the included examples.html-file
[2] (online version
here) in the browser.
This document lists some web sites that are filtered by FOXY by default.
It also gives a brief overview of the transformation-techniques applied to these
pages during the filtering process.
(NOTE: In some cases, an explicit reload of certain pages may be required to bypass possibly existing cached versions.)
In addition, a more detailed description of FOXY's default filtering behavior
(i.e., an auto-generated description of FOXY's default configuration)
is available online here.